Modal analysis of an operational offshore wind turbine using enhanced Kalman filter‐based subspace identification

Operational modal analysis (OMA) is an essential tool for understanding the structural dynamics of offshore wind turbines (OWTs). However, the classical OMA algorithms require the excitation of the structure to be stationary white noise, which is often not the case for operational OWTs due to the presence of periodic excitation caused by rotor rotation. To address this issue, several solutions have been proposed in the literature, including the Kalman filter‐based stochastic subspace identification (KF‐SSI) method which eliminates harmonics through estimation and orthogonal projection. In this paper, an enhanced version of the KF‐SSI method is presented that involves a concatenation step, allowing multiple datasets with similar environmental conditions to be used in the identification process, resulting in higher precision. This enhanced framework is applied to an operational OWT and compared to other OMA methods, such as the modified least‐squares complex exponential and PolyMAX. Using field data from a multi‐megawatt operational OWT, it is shown that the enhanced framework is able to accurately distinguish the first three bending modes with more stable estimates and lower variance compared to the original KF‐SSI algorithm and follows a similar trend compared to other approaches.